Diagnosis as Dialogue: Diagnostic Work in Calls to a Technical Support Helpline

The setting we describe in this chapter is Microsoft’s ‘technical support’ (telephone) call centre in Sydney, Australia, and the people we observe are call-taker ‘technicians’, talking with customers via telephone. For a charge of 42 Australian dollars (in 2002), callers throughout Australia and New Zealand can access the help-line and draw upon the expertise of the technicians, whose work revolves around two overarching tasks: (1) to elicit, diagnose and ‘treat’ the callers’ software-related problems during the actual call , where the caller, by following the real-time instructions of the call-taker, makes the necessary alterations or adjustments to his or her computer hardware and/or software; (2) to provide a text-based and computer-stored record or ‘catalogue’ of each call , to be used ‘in-house’ for various bureaucratic purposes, such as serving as reference material to inform return calls to or from the caller-customer.